I was wondering this as well. It looks like Vulkan should run easily on anything that supports OpenGL ES 3.1, and the Pi only does 2.0 IIRC. But there's a sliver of hope from a Broadcom logo on the bottom of the Vulkan page. Anyone knowledgeable want to comment on the odds that Broadcom or the Foundation will get Vulkan running on the BCM2836?

jdunson wrote: Anyone knowledgeable want to comment on the odds that Broadcom or the Foundation will get Vulkan running on the BCM2836?

These things usually work the other way round. The Vulkan developers get their stuff running on the RPi because they see it as a desirable platform for their software rather than the RPF (or Broadcom) doing it.

The RPF have much more important things to do like making sure my RPis run with the best possible "firmware" and kernel. I'd also like them to be developing their new hardware (DSI display, 2A, 2C, 3B, 3A, 3C, Compute Module2, Compute Module3 or other new shiny things, NOTE there's a huge amount of speculation in that list) with the next new SoC from Broadcom.

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jdunson wrote: Anyone knowledgeable want to comment on the odds that Broadcom or the Foundation will get Vulkan running on the BCM2836?

These things usually work the other way round. The Vulkan developers get their stuff running on the RPi because they see it as a desirable platform for their software rather than the RPF (or Broadcom) doing it.

Given Vulkan is the next version of/replacement for OpenGL, supporting Vulkan would mean writing a driver for it - something that hardware manufacturers usually do. So it's no more a case of the Vulkan developers getting it working on the VideoCore 4 GPU as it was the responsibility of the developers of OpenGL to getting that working on it.

Looking at the intermediate language that Vulkan uses (SPIR V), it looks very unlikely that the VC4 GPU could support it. It supports things like tesselation which the VC4 doesn't. So even if someone took the VC4 documentation an tried to produce a Vulkan driver I don't think it will be possible. I suspect the Broadcom logo is due to them having more capable GPUs that can support it.

Usually the hardware also have to support it. You can notice on products specs which version of DirectX or OpenGL given GPU card supports. And on top of that most ARM GPU units supports only OpenGL ES and not the "desktop" OpenGL so it's even farther away from supporting Vulkan.

riklaunim wrote:Usually the hardware also have to support it. You can notice on products specs which version of DirectX or OpenGL given GPU card supports. And on top of that most ARM GPU units supports only OpenGL ES and not the "desktop" OpenGL so it's even farther away from supporting Vulkan.